vanish, and meseems that I,
From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,
Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
Far set in fields and woods, the town I see
Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,
Cragg'd, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort
Beflagg'd. About, on seaward drooping hills,
New folds of city glitter. Last, the Forth
Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,
And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns,
There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,
Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,
My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;
The sea bombards their founded towers; the night
Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers,
One after one, here in this grated cell,
Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,
Fell upon lasting silence. Continents
And continental oceans intervene;
A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,
Environs and confines their wandering child
In vain. The voice of generations dead
Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,
My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,
And all mutation over, stretch me down
In that denoted city of the dead."

CHAPTER IV--HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED

At first sight it would seem hard to trace any illustration of the
doctrine of heredity in the case of this master of romance. George
Eliot's dictum that we are, each one of us, but an omnibus carrying down
the traits of our ancestors, does not appear at all to hold here. This
fanciful realist, this naive-wistful humorist, this dreamy mystical
casuist, crossed by the innocent bohemian, this serious and genial
essayist, in whom the deep thought was hidden by the gracious play of wit
and phantasy, came, on the father's side, of a stock of what the world
regarded as a quiet, ingenious, demure, practical, home-keeping people.
In his rich colour, originality, and graceful air, it is almost as though
the bloom of japonica came on a rich old orchard apple-tree, all out of
season too. Those who go hard on heredity would say, perhaps, that he
was the result of some strange back-stroke. But, on closer examination,
we need not go so far. His grandfather, Robert Stevenson, the great
lighthouse-builder, the man who reared the iron-bound pillar on the
destructive Bell Rock, and set life-saving lights there, was very intent
on his professional work, yet he had his ideal, and r